Famine
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One of the most devastating disasters that has afflicted humanity are famines. Unlike other natural disasters, famines do not have a single cause. They've happened all over the world for a wide variety of reasons. Some of them have natural causes and others are man-made. Famines are typically much worse than natural disasters and are rivaled only by pandemics and wars. Learn more about famines, their causes, and how they've devastated humanity throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash daily to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash daily. The genesis of this episode came from my efforts to come up with a list of the worst things that have ever happened to humans in history. I've found lists of the greatest disasters ever to impact humanity, and on that list were a lot of pandemics, natural disasters, and famines.

I've covered some of these in the past and I'll be covering more of these in the future as they've had an enormous impact on world history. However, famines are very different than say an earthquake or an outbreak of a disease. I don't want to say that every natural disaster or pandemic is the same as they're obviously not, but they are very different than famines. A famine can be the result of several different possible events. You can prepare for a natural disaster, but you can't usually prevent it from happening.

Famines, on the other hand, are often totally preventable. Also, unlike natural disasters, famines have become more and more rare as we have mastered the production and distribution of food. So let's start by defining what a famine is. A famine is just a severe and widespread shortage of food, leading to acute hunger, starvation, malnutrition, and often death. The concept is pretty simple, but the circumstances surrounding them are not.

Famines as they are understood today didn't really exist in the same way before the advent of agriculture. In hunter-gatherer societies, food shortages occurred due to environmental changes, resource depletion, or population pressures. But the nature of these shortages and how they were managed differed significantly. That isn't to say starvation never occurred, but it seldom resulted in wide-scale hunger.

Hunter-gatherers relied on various foods, including plants, animals, fish, and insects. This dietary diversity provided resilience against localized resource failures. If one food source declined, they could often rely on others. Hunter-gatherers were also highly mobile. When resources in one area became scarce, they could just move to another region where food was more abundant.

Pre-agricultural societies tended to have lower population densities, which reduced competition for resources and made it easier for smaller groups to sustain themselves. Deep knowledge of the natural world allowed hunter-gatherers to exploit seasonal and regional resources efficiently, reducing the likelihood of prolonged shortages. Despite these adaptive strategies, food shortages did occur, especially during extreme environmental change. Hunter-gatherers employed several strategies to cope with this.

They expanded their diets to include less preferred or harder-to-process foods, such as roots, tubers, wild grasses, or small game. Some groups turned to food with high preparation costs, like acorns, which required extensive processing to remove toxins. During lean periods, hunter-gatherers practiced resource conservation by limiting hunting and foraging to avoid depleting available stocks entirely. They also used limited food storage if they had the means, such as drying and fermenting foods.

The average hunter-gatherer was probably always a few weeks or possibly even a few days from hunger, but their nimble lifestyle allowed them to adapt accordingly. Strangely enough, the rise of agriculture was probably a response to food insecurity, and it was also the cause of famines. There's a great deal of debate as to why humans switch from hunting to farming. However, one of the most popular theories is that agriculture offered humans a more steady supply of food.

Instead of having to move with the seasons and herds constantly, the domestication of crops and animals allowed people to stay put. They could store grain and harvest their animals as needed, and eliminate the daily quest for food that dominated the lives of hunter-gatherers. However, there was a catch. Farming was great in terms of food security, until the point that something disrupted the system.

If that happened, then agriculturalists were now in a worse position than the hunter-gatherers. They couldn't drop everything to just go hunt. Moreover, they didn't have the skills or tools to do that, and the high population supported by agriculture meant that wild game and plants would be exhausted quickly in the area. The end result would be a famine. One of the earliest known famines was a widespread event that affected much of the earth known as the 4.2 kiloyear event.

The 4.2 kiloyear event, occurring around the year 2200 BC, was a major climatic disruption marked by widespread aridity and cooling that lasted for almost 200 years. The event significantly impacted civilizations across the globe, particularly in the Near East, North Africa, and the Indus Valley, where it caused severe droughts, reducing agricultural productivity, and causing societal upheaval.

The Akkadian Empire collapsed and the Egyptian Old Kingdom went into decline, as did the Indus Valley civilization. The famine stela is an ancient Egyptian inscription located on Sahel Island near Aswan, dating to the Ptolemaic period but recounting events from the Old Kingdom. It tells the story of a seven-year famine during the reign of Pharaoh Djoser, caused by the Nile's failure to flood adequately. Famines began appearing periodically in the historical record all over the world.

Around the year 100 BC, there was a great famine reported during the Han Dynasty in China. This, like many early famines, was caused by drought. Around the same time, a widespread famine occurred in Sri Lanka. In 26 BC, the historian Flavius Josephus reported a famine in the Levant. It was one of the first famines where an estimated death toll was given of 20,000 people. Not every famine was caused by drought or environmental conditions. There were famines in ancient Greece that were caused by war.

Farmers were also soldiers. When they were called away too long, they couldn't harvest their crops. Or in a worst-case scenario, they were killed and couldn't bring in their crops. During the Roman Civil Wars, food was often used as a weapon. Mark Antony, who controlled Egypt, kept grain from Rome to have a strategic advantage over Octavius. In the year 365, a famine broke out in Rome when the government required people to pay their taxes in grain. It wasn't that there wasn't enough food, it was that the food was being diverted to the government.

When the Western Roman Empire fell, there were periodic famines all over Europe which resulted in a large decline in population. It was one of the major reasons why the population of Rome fell 90% over a 400-year period. In the first millennium, better historical records were kept, and we then see periods of famine consistently all over the world. They appeared in Arabia, China, India, Byzantium, Egypt, and North Africa.

And these are just the ones that we know of. In many cases, the famines were recorded, but the causes or the scale is not known. We do know that sometime around the year 800 to 1000, a massive climatic event occurred in Mesoamerica that resulted in a massive famine and the collapse of the Maya Empire. An estimated 1 million people died. In 2030, the Kanki famine in Japan was the result of a series of volcanic eruptions.

Over a year, about 2 million Japanese people died, which was estimated to be about a third of the population of Japan. In Europe, famines were occurring about once every few decades. There was a good chance that if you lived in Europe in the Middle Ages, you may have lived through a famine. Most famines resulted in thousands to tens of thousands of deaths. The 14th century saw some of the greatest famines that the world had ever seen at that point.

The Great European Famine, which took place from 1315 to 1317, was one of the most devastating food crises of the medieval period, affecting much of northern and western Europe. It was triggered by a series of unusually heavy rains and prolonged cold weather, which began in 1315 and led to widespread crop failures. Wet conditions made planting and harvesting difficult, and essential grains like wheat and barley rotted in the waterlogged fields.

The resulting food shortages caused massive inflation, with the price of grain skyrocketing beyond what many could afford. An estimated 7.5 million people died. Just two decades later, China saw a massive famine. The Chinese famine of 1333-1337 was a catastrophic event during the late Yuan Dynasty, resulting from a combination of natural disasters and political instability.

Prolonged droughts, severe floods, and locust plagues devastated agricultural regions. The Yellow River itself changed course during this period, exacerbating the destruction and displacing millions of people. As a result, the famine-related deaths soared to approximately 6 million, with reports of mass starvation and social unrest. This famine caused immense suffering and contributed to the weakening of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, setting the stage for the subsequent rise of the Ming dynasty.

In the 17th century, India saw one of its greatest famines. The Deca famine of 1630-1632 was a catastrophic famine that struck the Deccan Plateau in India. It was triggered by a combination of severe drought, crop failures, and poor governance. The famine coincided with ongoing wars between the Mughals and local powers, which disrupted trade and relief efforts, exacerbating the crisis.

millions of people perished from starvation, and there were reports of widespread migration, abandonment of entire villages, and even cannibalism as desperation grew. After a series of regular famines over the course of the centuries in Europe, the 16th and 17th centuries saw a reduction in the number of famines, and the primary cause was the decline of feudalism.

The decline of feudalism in Europe, which began in the late Middle Ages and accelerated during the Renaissance, helped reduce the frequency and severity of famines by promoting economic and social changes that improved food security. Feudal systems, often characterized by localized production and rigid hierarchies, often resulted in inefficient agricultural practices and limited the movement of goods.

With the rise of centralized states, improved infrastructure and market-based economies, trade networks expanded, enabling surplus food to be transported to famine-stricken areas more efficiently. But that wasn't the end of famines. India still saw massive famines, the worst of which was the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. It saw 10 million dead, representing an entire third of the population.

The Chalisa famine of 1783 saw 11 million dead, and the Dojibara famine of 1789 saw another 11 million dead. There were even more famines in India in the 19th century, which was a reflection of their growing population and lack of agricultural modernization. The Chinese famine of 1906-1907 was perhaps the most devastating famine in world history to that point.

Flooding on the Hawaii River destroyed two harvests and led to the deaths of between 20 to 25 million people, almost the entire population of Australia. The 20th century saw its share of famines, but the cause of the worst famines changed. Most famines in history were due to weather and natural disasters. The 20th century famines were often man-made, and several cases were deliberately created.

The Holodomor in Ukraine, which I covered in a previous episode, was orchestrated by Stalin, as were other famines that were the result of farm collectivization. There were famines in multiple places that were a result of both world wars. The greatest famine in history was the Great Chinese Famine, which took place from 1958 to 1962. An estimated 50 million people died primarily due to the policies implemented by the Chinese Communist government during the Great Leap Forward.

Famines have never gone away totally, but they're almost never the result of droughts or flooding anymore. The famines that have taken place in the 21st century have almost all occurred in Africa and almost always due to civil wars. For all practical purposes, we have solved the problem of food in the modern world. Today, obesity is a bigger problem than starvation, which is a testament to just how far we've come.

The reason I wanted to do this episode is that many of the major famines that I mentioned briefly are planned for future episodes to discuss in depth, and I also thought it would be helpful to provide a high-level overview before diving into these various topics. The Bible calls famine one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and for good reason. The lack of food and starvation has been responsible for the deaths of more people than probably anything else in human history.

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